Celebrity Homes

Naomi Heaton

For the hard-hearted like me, the whole idea of London’s “villages” isn’t just about its free-range locals and diverse, vibrant cultures (and that word must be banned, you hear me), or any of that: it’s about architectural concentrations. The Georgian core, the grandiose Victorian developments, or the streets lined with Edwardian mansion blocks. That’s how you know where you are.

The largest number of London’s attractive architectural clusters are – no surprise – in the two richest boroughs, Kensington & Chelsea and Westminster (sorry, other boroughs with lovely parts). Think of Osbert Lancaster’s “Pont Street Dutch” late-Victorian red-brick cliffs. They’re in Knightsbridge, of course. The creamy stucco-ness of Belgravia and the Pimlico grid are mainly down to Thomas Cubitt, the great Victorian builder (and great, great grand-father of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall).

And think of the Ruritanian stage-set of John Nash’s palace-fronted neo-classical Regent’s Park Terraces, conceived as part of Nash’s grand plan for central London.

Naomi Heaton lives in a large cream Nash stucco terrace near Regent’s Park. This makes sense because she’s CEO of London Central Portfolio, real estate investment experts who specialise in those smart concentrations in those two most super-prime London boroughs. Her company buys, re-works and manages a large portfolio of smart rental places for property investors across the world. The cream of the crop, one’s tempted to say (there’s a lot of cream stucco involved).

She describes her client base as largely international, globally wealthy high-net worth and ultra high-net worth individuals and advises them on investing in London’s prime heritage housing stock. “Our most challenging job is to convince wealthy investors, who are buying to rent, to concentrate on small heritage units, rather than trophy properties or luxury new builds. In prime central London, it is our unique historic properties which offer the greatest growth prospects.”

I’ve got a thing about the phrase “smart lettings”, namely that the interiors often look the same, whatever the architecture. But advance just a foot into Heaton’s entrance hall – it’s very red, very Chinese lacquer red, with an internal pond, dramatic 17th- and 18th-century portraits and a black and white marble floor – and you’ll see it’s very un-careful, intensely personal, and rammed full of things.

Heaton and her husband Jonathan Waxman, professor of oncology at Imperial College and president of Prostate Cancer UK, are risk-taking decorators and enthusiastic collectors of things across the spectrum from 19th-century popular (Staffordshire figures, Sunderland lustreware) to contrapuntal Japanese contemporary sculpture. Along the way are particular favourites including William de Morgan and John Piper. On the first floor landing a collection of de Morgan tiles has been set in a six foot-high frame – “they used to be propped up on shelves with Blu Tack,” Heaton says – “but then we thought they could be a composition.” They’re bold collectors, following their instincts, buying odd bravura things that frighten less confident buyers – but there’s method in it. They research things; the back-stories of artists and movements.

They find things they like – Johnny’s beloved Victorian glass lions, for instance – and start buying them in numbers. Glass lions pop up all over the house. And arty or amusing tiles, they’re everywhere too. They love Victorian popular art, but they also like “Modern British” artists such as John Piper, Michael Ayrton or Eric Gill. They like elegant Regency tables and gilded mirrors but sleep in a massive 16th-century oak four-poster that could stand in for the Bed of Ware.

Though their enthusiasms are varied and counter-intuitive, they’re often long-standing. They’re in Christie’s and Bonhams practically every week, and online following objects around the world. However a lot of the things here have a long back-story, like the objects bought from long-gone Camden Passage antique dealers and Stoke Newington architectural salvage yards. Often, the “difficult” auction lots they want they get for less than they budgeted – “when we started, the more OTT things weren’t really valued,” Heaton says.

Different zones in this singular house have different looks. You move from the hard shine of the entrance hall to the staircase and its watery green-blue walls, and you could be in a country house near Bath. And the drawing-room, with its full-on ‘golden-brown’ background and elegant correct-to-period Regency furniture, is saying something else again. “I like the theatre of interior design,” Heaton says.

Now you see it – the Regency Theatre of the underlying Nash house – now you don’t, when you’re in an eminently Victorian interlude. But all eclecticism aside, you absolutely know, when you look out of the window, that you couldn’t be anywhere but one of London’s super-prime architectural dreamscapes.